Which brands are failing

Their views towards gaming as an industry were flawed. They viewed gaming as an individual process rather than a shared experience which was the complete opposite of their original design.

Development got shorted. A kids toy retailer, Toys R Us, was once one of the largest toy store chains. The brand signed its own death when signing a year contract to be an exclusive vendor of toys on Amazon. Despite the deal, Amazon allowed other toy vendors to sell on its site too. Toys R Us sued, but as a result, missed the opportunity to develop its own e-commerce presence. In the company filed for bankruptcy, because of its huge debt and retail competition.

But the physical stores continue to be open. Gary Vaynerchuk shares his passionate description of what went wrong with the toy giant. At first, it was a success, but because there was no plug and play solutions for e-commerce management and customer service that could scale.

Now Pets. Their famous marketing campaign, which was a sock puppet running around the streets interviewing people is a remnant of an era that promised so much delivered very little. Former Pets. A retail music chain that was first to create the concept of the retail music store. In the stores, you could get CDs, cassette tapes, DVDs, electronic gadgets, video games, and accessories.

Napster , a peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service, spread like a virus when it launched in And so began the downfall of the record industry. Even after the death of Napster, people were able to download music from the Internet through illegal services such as Limewire, Kazaa, BitTorrent.

It was fast and easy to get music for free. Tower Records filed for bankruptcy in due to its large debts. Total revenue from U.

It was known as the place to browse, and now belongs to the long list of retail companies that failed due to the rise in online services and e-commerce. But the company began to struggle with the digital disruptions. At first, HMV refused to believe the bloom of online retailers or that people will start downloading music. The leaders of the company felt confident about their brand and loyal customers who in their heads loved coming to the shop for the floor experience.

In , Hilco Capital purchased HMV, taking the company out of administration and saving of its stores. Philip Beeching gives his opinion on why he thinks HMV failed. Compaq was a company founded in that sold, developed, and supported computers. It used to be one of the largest sellers of PCs in the s. The company struggled to keep up with the price wars against Dell and was acquired for 25 billion dollars by HP in The brand remained in use by HP until David L. At the end of the s, the Dotcom Bubble was on the rise and Enron decided to participate by creating Enron Online in , an electronic trading website.

That same year the dotcom bubble burst and Enron quickly began building high-speed broadband telecom networks. This project ended up costing a fortune for the company with no return in profit. Long gone are the days when almost every kid in America had a Twinkie in their lunchbox.

Yet Hostess continued to churn out highly processed foods. Their failure to keep up with taste trends and rebrand themselves caused them to file for bankruptcy in laying off its 18, workers and putting its snack brands up for sale. Later on, fueled by the huge demand of nostalgic fans, the brand was rescued by a billionaire Dean Metropoulos and re-opened as Hostess Brands.

General Motors GM , was a corporation that used to design, market, manufacture, and distribute vehicles and vehicle parts. Founded in , the company was the largest automobile manufacturer from through By failing to innovate and ignoring the competition, GM found themselves at the doorstep of the largest bankruptcy in American history.

The company leaders only cared about making a profit and they chose not to invest parts or products that were reliable. They avoided investing in new technologies that could have improved the quality of its product to meet the changing needs of customers. The current company, General Motors Company GMC was founded in and purchased the majority of the assets of the old company.

A relatively unknown joint venture between Toyota and GM in California during the summer of , was the result of an unlikely pairing of two competitors.

Ultimately NUMMI was a failure, but the lessons learned allowed GM to continue to innovate and learn from its mistakes years into the future. Their Instant Messenger platform was one of the best messaging apps when it first came out. Additionally, the decline of dial-up and rise of broadband led to a rapid decline in monthly customers.

Their appeal to their customers were their physical stores on the high streets of UK. When everything started to shift online, their stores started losing the appeal and Clinton Cards became a dying business.

The way we gifted for these occasions changed, not the popularity of the occasion. The brand was bought by American Greetings in and renamed to Clintons. The Sharper Image, a consumer electronics and lifestyle product company, was founded in and got massively popular due to its Ionic Breeze air purifier.

Things started to shift for The Sharper Image In While the rest of the world was changing The Sharper Image remained the same while also making a lot of strategic missteps.

The company depended too much on the air purifiers success and Consumers Reports started questioning the safety of the product. Because the air purifiers criticism, masses of people started returning the faulty item. The company was losing so much money that in The Sharper Image declared bankruptcy and closed down 90 out of its stores.

Jason Chen explains exactly what went wrong with Sharper Image. After VCR's began fading into obscurity, there was a gap in the market for people that wanted to record their favorite show and avoid commercials. Tivo was one of the first digital video recording DVR products to come on the market and fill a need.

It was an instant success. The reason TiVo is on this list is that the brand decided to play nice on the market. They attempted to sue cable companies too late; who came out with their own DVRs.

By the time they court documents were filed, DVRs were everywhere. At its peak in , Tivo had 4. The streaming media era began in but it would leave Tivo behind. Pebble corporation developed a line of smartwatches. Their campaign on Kickstarter became one of the most-funded product of all time. Based on the fast evolution of the wrist-worn wearable market, most major consumer electronics manufacturers jumped in on the fun and made their own. The predictions of wearables booming on the market were falsely tied to the success of smartphones.

The market was still very small and not mature enough to sustain the type of predicted growth. In the company called it quits and sold their technology to Fitbit. Here is an example of a car invention that failed. A car that was supposed to be safe, long lasting and sustainable. Because of the cars shoddy performance, DeLorean produced fewer than cars and filed for bankruptcy.

Although the car was a failure, it left a mark with its innovative design and is known from the Back to the Future film trilogy.

The Concorde was a British-French turbojet-powered airline that closed its doors in An airline founded in used to have one of the fastest and greatest designed aircraft. Even though the total flight time to cross Atlantic was less than four hours, its high energy consumption forced airline companies to look for better options.

Vox put out an incredibly interesting miniature documentary, What happened to the plane that could cross the Atlantic in 3. Why did it fail? The first digital iPad-only newspaper launched in It featured flashy graphics, video and new ways for readers to interact with the content.

Readers were only able to access the newspaper through a paid subscription through the iTunes store. The revenue The Daily gained was split between Apple but that model was unsustainable and after less than two years, The Daily shut down.

Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term. Dawn C. The XFL had approximately 14 million viewers in its debut, but the following week the ratings dropped to 4. Nortel was a multinational telecom and data networking equipment manufacturer that failed big time.

The company had a vision that voice, data, and images would extend to every person and device in the world. The Leaders were blamed for fraud and fired in and by the time a new CEO took over it was already too late. Their research and development team had fallen behind and the business began to decline because of broadband and VoIP. In the company filed for bankruptcy.

Jamie Sturgeon's take on where Nortel went wrong. Upon summarizing this list, it may be relevant to ask what is the main reason all large companies are corporations? The answer lies in the liability for debts incurred when such big businesses fail. When a business has the organizational structure of a corporation, the owners are not put at risk of any personal liability should the business fail. And as can be observed from the examples above, this has practical benefits.

See where the companies that failed to innovate were based and see who might have started close by: Click on the map to navigate! The most successful innovation initiatives in large corporations are those that continue to innovate and digitalize their strategy. Never resist innovation as a business. Make sure that your leadership and strategies are in place , and always work on improving and trying out different types of innovation strategy.

Take these steps in the fight against becoming a corporation that failed to innovate. Nokia believed they could arrive late in the smartphone game and succeed. In , Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, the touch screen phone we all know today. The iPhone was the first mobile phone without a physical keyboard, it was revolutionary. In Nokia finally made the decision to compete and release a smartphone, but it was too late.

So it was so-long to Snake. But its failure to foresee the rise of e-books and embrace the world of e-commerce are often cited as the main factors of its downfall. However, we still have other physical bookstores despite e-books and Amazon prime delivery? Yes everyone would be quick to blame Netflix. They moved with the times and switched to streaming when the market did.

But did you know that Netflix actually tried to hand Blockbuster a lifeboat and it was refused? The plan was for Blockbuster to advertise Netflix in their stores while Netflix would run Blockbuster online.

Another case of kicking themselves now is when it comes to Yahoo. Yahoo undervalued the importance of search and in their CEO refused to go through with a deal to buy Google.

Yes, actual Google! The search engine that receives 5. How do I know that? I Googled it. And in Yahoo had a deal to buy Facebook but Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, backed out when Yahoo lowered their offer. In Yahoo was one of the main players in the online advertising market and, instead of search, the company decided to focus more on becoming a media giant.

The decision to focus more on media meant they ignored consumer trends and a need to improve the user experience. Yahoo managed to gain a massive number of viewers but failed to make enough of a profit in order to scale. A personal motorized scooter invented and brought to the market in was supposed to be the new, low-pollution, quick way to travel short distances. If Segway had cleared the rules on where it could be used with authorities before setting the price and expectations or aimed for a different market, it could have been a different story.

It was often found in train stations and airports to attract the attention of their target market; business-men. The stores only sold scarves, ties, and cufflinks, but it turned out men were mostly buying their ties when they bought shirts. It was announced late that Tie Rack would begin closure of its remaining 44 retail stores. A little bit of thinking outside the box and listening to the climate they were selling in could have changed the path for Tie Rack.

And the silver bullet, the same again, failure to adopt a touch screen keyboard. BlackBerry was more concerned about protecting what it already had, a smartphone that was highly praised from into the early s. This is the same spirit that animates our lists of startup failure post-mortems and the most expensive startup failures , as well as our list of the top 12 reasons startups fail.

As one of the best-known brands of purified water in the world, Evian occupies an enviable position in the broader beverage industry. In , the company decided to diversify by manufacturing a support brassiere that could be filled with water. It also featured a small pouch that could hold a bottle of mineral water. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bra failed to catch on and was discontinued shortly after its introduction.

Google Glass might have come too soon. However, intense competition in the wearables market and a protracted legal battle with dominant incumbent FitBit resulted in considerable financial losses that ultimately sank the company.

Jawbone, which was founded as AliphCom in , originally developed military-grade audio hardware before moving into the consumer market with its popular Bluetooth-enabled wireless speaker.

Jawbone diversified once again in when it unveiled its fitness-tracker wearable. Jawbone struggled with inventory shortages and a series of high-profile executive departures, and customer service standards deteriorated as its legal battles wore on. The company finally entered liquidation in Yoga pants are designed to be form-fitting, but some models of pants and leggings from the yoga gear giant proved to be a bit too revealing, becoming translucent when wearers bent over.

Wilson later issued an apology and the company issued a recall. By April , Nike had fired most of the team behind Fuel. Yet this is essentially what happened to Kanoa , manufacturer of wireless headphones that ultimately never saw the light of day.

Despite having met its crowdfunding goals, the company could not produce a prototype that matched the standards it had promised backers.

After essentially starting over from scratch in , Kanoa sent a pair of its headphones to an influential YouTube technology reviewer Cody Crouch, also known as iTwe4kz. Four days after Crouch posted his review, Kanoa ceased operations. This version of the popular FitBit activity-tracking device was causing skin irritation and even blisters so severe that it resulted in a class-action lawsuit in California.

At the height of the Covid pandemic, Singapore Airlines SIA dreamed up a way to allow Singaporeans to fly without violating travel restrictions: flights to nowhere.

For instance, it turned one of its aircraft into a restaurant that sat on the tarmac. In , Indian car manufacturer Tata Motors launched the Tata Nano, an ultra-compact hatchback designed specifically for the domestic Indian market. Tata Motors launched the Nano with motorcyclists in mind.

However, the low price tag led to numerous cut corners in production, which resulted in serious safety flaws. Tata ultimately sold fewer than 8, Nanos before pulling the vehicle from the market entirely. Its fate was sealed when the auto industry faced a dramatic downturn in the early 80s and only about 9, cars were built before production ceased in Now reserved for mall cops only. Many of these flops were born of legacy companies looking to change to stay competitive or relevant.

The result was underwhelming on all fronts: small, boxy, and outclassed by foreign luxury cars. It pleased no one and was phased out after six years in production probably five too many. Sometimes a flop is born from laziness or oversight, in this case bordering on criminal negligence, as Ford went with shoddy materials in this car that notoriously burst into flames when struck from behind.

Possibly seeking to emulate stylistically the pyramids of the culture that is its namesake, the Aztek suffered from an unappealing design that some consumers thought looked too much like a minivan, leading to low sales and a short production run 4 years. Seemingly combining the worst elements of an SUV and a convertible including strange body styling and poor rear visibility with the top up , the CrossCabriolet started its life as a concept car before heading to factories and then to dealer lots.

The problem: the EV1 was only available in California and Arizona because cold climates were harmful to battery life and performance. GM only sold 1, units over the course of 4 years before completely scrapping the model.

Though it was promising as a comfortable, pressurized passenger cabin, the Comet suffered a number of catastrophic failures within a year, including structural failure. The Comet was taken off the market and tested. The company eventually launched an improved Comet 2, Comet 3 and Comet 4, but sales never recovered from the initial setback. Hoverboards seemed like the next big thing, until they started exploding. Thousands of hoverboards from at least eight brands were recalled in because the lithium-ion batteries in the devices caught fire.

But the problems were occurring well before that, as several airlines banned hoverboards altogether in Once upon a time, industry observers believed that Coda Automotive had the potential to be a major player in the independent electric car marketplace as a moderately priced alternative to Tesla. Alas, its first and only vehicle, the Coda Sedan, was a total flop.

The company had hoped to save costs on amenities and instead focus on the range that the car could drive without being re-charged. Almost any product would have failed to live up to the hype that surrounded the Facebook Phone. What the public got instead was the HTC First, an Android-skinned device whose main feature was being geared toward the Facebook Home application. An early tablet that played HD videos but lacked a native email client and calendar, two things Blackberries were renowned for doing well.

It also had a poor selection of apps, the lifeblood of any tablet. Users passed on this gimmicky handheld. Only 42,, units were sold. HP launched its TouchPad in July — and discontinued after only 6 months. Retailers sold out of the significantly cheaper tablets almost immediately, but the product was ultimately discontinued.

A song capacity and lack of ability to download songs via the web were the death knell for this iPhone precursor. This weird black orb thing was a media device that could connect to your TV and speakers and stream a list of various music tracks and YouTube videos that you and your friends co-created.

These were pseudo-smartphones with sliding screens and physical keyboards but no apps or games and pricey data plans. Discontinued after only 6 weeks. VHS players were cheaper to produce, which appealed to consumers. Tape length was also an issue: from their release in , VHS tapes could hold two hours, meaning that most movies could fit on one tape; Betamax was capped at an hour in only expanded to two in the early 80s.

These issues and a host of other challenges contributed to an uphill battle that Betamax eventually lost. Betamax vs. VHS might have had a chance of going the other way, but LaserDisc by Philips never seemed to have a shot. Numerous updates and improved models followed, but sales never rivaled the much cheaper Macintosh and it was discontinued in This idea almost seems bound to fail from the jump: a clunky flip phone introduced in with a lousy interface set up to only receive sports information from ESPN.

Enter the Nook, its attempt at staying relevant and maybe even reclaiming some of its lost market share from the online retailer. Sony loves the format wars. This entry was an audio format competitor to CDs, but without read-write or computer compatibility, a pretty big miss even in the 90s, when music was just starting to make the digital migration that would eventually become its future mp3s, streaming, etc.

Consumers wisely avoided this format. After that, you could just toss the discs out or pay an additional fee to continue watching them. Iridium launched 66 linked satellites into orbit to use for its satellite phone network.

Now come the downsides: dollars-per-minute usage rates ouch and a cellphone reportedly the size of a brick. DATs were supposed to replace conventional audio tapes and allow higher-quality recordings. While there were plenty of weaknesses to harp on, probably the biggest flaw was its chiclet-style keyboard, which reviewers reported was near unusable.

It was plagued by overheating, case cracking, and was underpowered to boot, a triple-threat that consumers passed on. Instead it turned out photos that were small and blurry.

Another entrant in the perennial format wars, this music player was almost a good idea with a slick aluminum casing and a small size for the 20 gigs of memory it held. But its development, with Singapore startup Fusion Garage, was rocky from the start.

The troubled product launched March 25, , just weeks before the iPad came out and set the bar for all future tablets. The internal strife, high price point, weak specs, and lack of app support ultimately doomed this early tablet. The Sony Airboard was, unwittingly, another pre-iPad attempt at building a tablet. Sony abandoned the product completely in Few corporate flops on this list have been as explosive as this one.

Launched in August of , the Note 7 boasted powerful hardware and had consumers chomping at the bit to get their hands on them. The anticipation quickly faded, though, as reports of Note 7s catching fire started hitting the news. By September 2, Samsung had stopped sales of the device. Next came a formal recall in the US on September 15 and a worldwide recall on October The product was completely abandoned on October Daimler , parent of the Mercedes-Benz car brand, decided that it would go after the US home energy market.

Like the Powerwall, the Mercedes-Benz battery was intended to store energy from solar panels. The major flaw in solar power is that it obviously is basically produced during the day and in sunny weather, so storage systems are needed if electricity is to be generated at other times. However, in April , Mercedes-Benz announced that it was dissolving the US subsidiary set up to run this home energy business and ceasing manufacturing of home battery packs globally. What happened to the would-be Tesla killer?

It was expensive for the market, and basically over-served its customers. Users could navigate with touch, then click the entire screen down like a button to make choices. But faulty tech and bugs in the software doomed the phone from the start. The majority of Storms that did sell were quickly returned, and the phone was shelved later the same year.

The well-known coffee maker tried to get into the at-home soda machine market, but failed big time. Each pod made an 8 oz glass of soda. Users complained that the machine was too loud and took a long time to cool down. The company pulled the product. Rumors of a GooglePhone had persisted for years, so enthusiasm for the Nexus One, which was announced in early , was high. Google said it would sell the phones directly either unlocked or locked to T-Mobile.

The problem is that unlocked phones are not the norm in North America where networks generally subsidize part of the cost.